One of the most common structural elements found at airfields is a wind sock. This element is normally mounted on a post at an elevated location, and comprises a hollow tapered tube of light-weight, flexible material, which fills with air at the slightest breeze. The forward end of the wind sock is also normally provided with a swivel, and the wind sock is further provided with high visibility coloration; so that pilots approaching an airfield may readily observe and make note of which direction the wind is coming from to assist them in landing the aircraft.
While the foregoing general structural arrangement for a wind sock is adequate for daytime operations; the standard procedure for rendering a wind sock visible during night time conditions is to provide the wind sock with a remote eternal source of illumination such as a bank of floodlights or the like.
The primary reason that a bank of floodlights is normally required to illuminate the wind sock can be directly attributable to the fact that the wind sock to be effective must be large enough to be visible to a pilot at a substantial distance, coupled with the fact that the 360 degrees rotation of the windshield requires an arc of rotation that is beyond the capabilities of virtually all single illumination sources.
Having appreciated the enormous amount of energy required in the past to illuminate a relatively simple structure, alternate and less energy consuming solutions were sought to address this problem and the ultimate outcome of that research resulted in the development of the structure that forms the basis of the present invention.